Biff the unclean

Originally posted by Charles Darwin
Of course, I agree one doesn't automatically buy any story just because there were some witnesses.
But they help
But really, there very little comparison between the 2 cases, in terms of #, documentation, and incentive (or should I say disincentive in the case of the early Christians).
There is NO evidence of Jesus. No witnesses. No one mentioned anything about him during his "life"
I suppose the Old Testament Messianic prophecies don't count either.
Nope, they don't count at all

Family Man

It's a little more complicated than societies being corrupted. Under your hypothesis, all societies would have started with the correct moral view, then become corrupted. But slavery was widely accepted in nearly all societies. I don't recall any biblical passages, even in the NT, where slavery was condemned. It wasn't until modern times did slavery become to be seen as immoral, which is quite the opposite of your hypothesis. It would appear that societies didn't get corrupted, but became uncorrupted! What, God couldn't tell people until the 18th century that slavery was wrong?

The God/morality hypothesis mights no sense given the reality of the world.

Jah191

If I remember some Old Testament passages correctly, you are allowed to take your enemies women as slaves or something to that effect. Man, the Old Testament reads like a script to an Ahnuld movie....

Family Man

Actually, the big difference between the two is that the Mormon case is better documented, thus more easily refuted. We know who the participants were and what their motivations were. We have the benefit of accounts from non-Mormons.

Christian history (particularly the gospel stories) is much more obscure and difficult to evaluate. We only have the Christian view of things, and what has been passed to us has been passed by the winners of history. We don't know who the gospel writers were, but we do know that they had a agenda, which renders their writings suspect. Finally, historians never take supernatural claims at face value, for the very simple reason that they are impossible to verify.

As for the "disincentive", I remind you that Joseph Smith was killed in large part because of his beliefs, and his movement only survived by moving to a very isolated and unwanted valley in the middle of the Utah desert. History is, in fact, replete with people willing to die for honestly held, if mistaken beliefs. Besides Smith, there's Jim Jones, Heaven's Gate, the Albigensians, and millions of Germans and Japanese in WWII that bought into their leaders' vision. Throw in the fact that Christians persecutions were rather sporadic, and the "they wouldn't die for a lie" defense is very weak.

As for the messianic prophecies, it is well known that the gospel writers mined the OT for "prophecies" and wrote their stories accordingly. If you want more information of the critical view of this, I suggest you start a thread in BC&H. There are posters there that know considerably more about this than I do.

I see that you have sound-bite Christianity down pat. Unfortunately for you, we've heard it all here, and it doesn't hold up under critical review.

WinAce

In addition, many "Messianic Prophecies" were based on out-of-context OT verses, never meant as prophecies per se, that the authors used in an ANE practice known as "typology".

Nowadays, we call it retroactive shoehorning, and it forms the basis for everything from cold reading to Nostradamus loonies.

Here's a webpage where I apply this ancient art to demonstrate Napoleon is predicted in the Bible.

Charles Darwin

Good points; in my model we would have to believe that humanity is corrupt from the get go, such that societies, in fact, have no guarantee of getting it right. Your suggestion, that societies ought to begin by getting it right, really doesn't follow from my model.

Family Man

In that case, you have no way of making your claim that morality comes from God. How would you know? Your hypothesis explains nothing we see in the real world.

However, a naturalistic view of morality would explain the variation in morality we see. Variation occurs because of the different environments and relative isolation that societies grew up in. A much more productive view of things.

Charles Darwin

Sure, you're certainly right about historians not accepting supernatural claims at face value. As Bultmann explained, history cannot be rent with such events, for they lie outside of the historical continuum. Translation: We are gnostics and we don't want God in our world.



Well, if that's the case then you're right and I'm wrong. However, I can't help but get the feeling that your "critical" view is not entirely objective. For instance, how is it that it the motives of the gospel writers is "well known" when, according to you, we can know so little of those times.

Charles Darwin

Woe, hang on just a minute there. You've shoe-horned me into the CS Lewis position. Remember, I said I'm *not* arguing his position. I said that there is evidence for an absolute standard, not in mores held across the world, but in the strong personal judgements people make -- they don't say "Hitler was evil; but that's just my opinion."

Family Man

The correct translation is that we can't use the normal means of evaluating evidence to decide whether there is a God. Since I don't trust the other means, I see no reason to believe that there is one. I have no problem with you believing as long as you don't use your belief to restrict my right not to believe -- as many Christians I've met would do in a heartbeat.


To know little doesn't mean we know nothing, and since the prophecy fulfillment writings in the NT refer to writings in the OT it wasn't hard for scholars to compare the two and realize that the gospel writers were making prophecies out of things that weren't prophecies.

As for my objectivity, I have no problem with you questioning it. The answer is whether my arguments and facts hold up under critical scrutiny. I think that if you research the issues laid out here, you'll find out I've been objective.